Writing, daily word counts and plotting versus pantsing

This will only be of interest to a few people – those who are writing novels and those who happen upon this site. So ‘few’ might be overselling it but I don’t care, this is my website and it is a topic I have been thinking about a lot. If you happen to be at the juncture of that particular Venn diagram, then welcome, cheers and kudos to you!

I am writing a fantasy book. Like all fantasy books, it is ludicrously long for some reason. When I started writing, I spent ages agonising over whether I should plot it or pants it. For those (and again ‘those’ is being optimistic) who don’t know what that is, here is a very brief explanation.

Plotting versus Pantsing

There are three schools of thought:

Plotting is when you plan every event in the novel in advance. The arguments tend to agree that this is how you can guarantee a decent plot arc and pace the novel evenly. The downside is that it can sometimes feel a bit characterless and can be boring as shit to write. People like Ken Follet do this and probably most thrillers writers too.

Pantsers are those who have a vague idea (or not) and just write and see what happens. Stephen King is famously a pantser but he has great ideas and can write, so he totally gets away with it. This approach can lead to great characters and surprising twists. It can also lead to a massive let down in the end when the author clearly had no idea where they were going with the story. Frequently a ‘pantser’ could do with a decent editor.

A mixture. This is where most people seem to lie and what I eventually opted for. If it’s good enough for Neil Gaiman, it is good enough for me. I had a great idea, some characters and a vague ending and what it is all about for the end. Then I went for it and am now 135,000 words of a slightly meandering story in but with the end now in sight. It will need a massive rewrite or dozen though.

I guess what makes a fantasy book a bit different (science fiction too) is that you need to create a world before you can even begin. This involves a map and history and currency and politics and religions and all sorts of stuff. If you are pantsing, ideas form while you create. I had the main idea but as I worked on the minutiae of the world, a lot of story elements similarly took hold as worked on how many silver coins to a gold one or drew little pictures of trees on a map. On the other hand, all the world building also acts as plotting for the story, especially if there is something awesome like a journey or quest as you need to know where everyone is going.

 

Daily Word Count

Once I had started, this was what I then began to obsess about. I keep mentioning Stephen King because he wrote an awesome book called “On Writing” where he talks about all this stuff. He writes 2000 words a day. Which I think is a lot and it is generally agreed that he is fairly prolific. He is also a full-time fiction writer while most of us saps have to work at other jobs to pay the bills. There are kindle authors who are knocking out 10-20 thousand words a day, which is just insane. Michael Crichton put himself through med school by writing fun but cheap thrillers and did 18000 words a day in his holidays. But it has to be noted that when he became a more professional author and actually put his real name on the books, he wrote considerably less, and it was noticeably better.

JG Ballard used to write three hours a day and his prose is superb but his books were thin. Fantasy writers like Patrick Rothfuss and GRR Martin write huge books that seem to take longer the more famous they get. (In both cases, their last books were published in 2011 and frankly it is annoying.)

So is setting daily count good? Some wait for inspiration. For part of my English degree, I was taught by an established novelist. She had fixed writing days, so her work didn’t clash. I guess it differs depending on circumstance.

I write for my day job but that is all non-fiction. Some days I love writing fiction as it can be cathartic after the tedium of work. Other days I have had enough and just want to go to the pub or shotgun zombies in the face on my PS4. As a professional writer and giver of unasked for advice, I can tell you that waiting for inspiration is bollocks. You need to write as much as you can – some days it’s a breeze and others it is like pulling out nostril hairs with just your fingers – painful and surprisingly difficult.

What I have decided to do is aim to write 500 words a day. If work makes that impossible, then I do 1000 the next day. If I write 4000 in a week then I can play games or go to the pub at the weekend. I basically bribe myself.

To be honest, I have lost the point of this particular blog entry. It could be that these are issues that have been on my mind a lot recently. Or it could be that I am procrastinating and putting off my 500 words. Whatever. I’m going to the pub. Good luck with it all.